Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

business

“The Manager’s Path” by Camille Fournier

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Subtitle: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth & Change

I expected this book to be boring, but it’s engagingly written and connects with my experience of working in tech. Camille Fournier writes from her own experience as a CTO (Chief Technical Officer) at several companies and includes quotes from other tech leaders, both men and women.

She starts with mentoring, which almost every technical person is expected to do eventually, and works up through tech lead, manager, director, up to CTO and VP of Engineering. She advises anyone who wants to be a manager of software engineers to spend enough time learning to code (5-7 years) to have those skills solidly available going forward.

I’m a software engineer who has mentored people and led projects, but will not be climbing the corporate ladder any higher. It was interesting to hear about the concerns that arise at higher levels. The need to figure out who is unhappy, why teams are not working well together, who is managing badly, and who might leave suddenly. The need to make good decisions about future directions on insufficient data. The need to develop intuition and keep taking in information to guide those decisions.

As she talks about mentoring interns and managing individual contributors, she includes all technical roles. Her primary advice is that relationships and communication are crucial even though programming might appear to be a solitary technical occupation. Not only do successful projects require communication with other engineers and the manager, they require communication with the stakeholders who say what to build, and the sales and marketing people who help it go out into the world.

She talks a lot about the importance of one-on-one meetings between managers and the people they manage to build trust and address problems early. She recommends skip-level meetings, where a director who manages managers also meets with individual contributors.

In addition, positive relationships are crucial to success in the working world. Not only do they make work more pleasant, they help people collaborate and share information. People who like working together help each other get jobs in the future.

I can clearly see this is true over the 30 years of my career. I built positive working relationships naturally, and I’m still not sure the advice makes sense until one experiences it. It’s not about fake, forced networking with people one doesn’t like – it’s about staying connected and friendly with people one does like to support one another going forward. In school, success artificially depends only on individual actions (although I think kids do more group work nowadays), but most accomplishments out in the world depend on interconnected people building things together.

The pronouns in this book bothered me. Rather than using she/he or they, Camille Fournier switched between using he for some examples and she for others. An intern was he while being described in general, and then she when performance problems came up. After that the pronouns were more even-handed, but I was very aware of them all the way through, braced for women to be portrayed negatively. As far as I remember, they/them pronouns were not used for anyone.

Recommended to anyone who works in a technical field, and especially anyone who wants to become a manager.

Links from the book:
The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman aka Joreen, a classic essay on why managers are necessary.

On Being A Senior Engineer which includes the suggestion to use senior influence to sponsor (rather than mentor) underrepresented people in engineering. Recommend them for positions. Highlight their accomplishments. Praise them publicly. Also refers to What Does Sponsorship Look Like by Lara Hogan.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Quiet” by Susan Cain

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Subtitle: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Recommended to me by: Leah K. Walsh

This is a carefully researched, well written, engaging book that says, “Introverts really are good enough!” Since I didn’t go in doubting that, I felt off-balance as I read, especially since I thought it would be a book about small business marketing for introverts.

From the summary at the end:

This book is about introversion as seen from a cultural point of view. Its primary concern is the age-old dichotomy between the “man of action” and the “man of contemplation,” and how we could improve the world if only there were a greater balance of power between the two types. It focuses on the person who recognizes him- or herself somewhere in the following constellation of attributes: reflective, cerebral, bookish, unassuming, sensitive, thoughtful, serious, contemplative, subtle, introspective, inner-directed, gentle, calm, modest, solitude-seeking, shy, risk-averse, thin-skinned. Quiet is also about this person’s opposite number: the “man of action” who is ebullient, expansive, sociable, gregarious, excitable, dominant, assertive, active, risk-taking, thick-skinned, outer-directed, light-hearted, bold, and comfortable in the spotlight.

The book starts with the story of Rosa Parks refusing to get off the bus, celebrating her for doing it in a quiet, unassuming way, without saying that racism required someone exactly like that for her role. It does come back to her story later and say that she was already trained in nonviolent resistance.

There are historical portraits of Eleanor Roosevelt, Dale Carnegie, and Steve Wozniak. Interviews with students at Harvard Business School where everything is done in groups, noting how influential the graduates are. Scientific studies involving tormenting monkeys to see the effects of a gene for processing serotonin. (No one seems to note the problems with animal research in books like this.) Other studies showing that group brainstorming is not as creative or innovative as people working alone, unless it’s done online. A longitudinal study showing that babies who are highly reactive tend to become introverted kids and adults.

There is a big emphasis on spouses and “mates.” It’s okay that the introverts were unpopular in high school, because of how happy they are with their mates and kids now. The vast majority are heterosexual. I vaguely remember mention of a gay couple, but it went by fast, in contrast with the extensive profiles of several heterosexual couples.

Gender roles are never overtly discussed, but it feels like this whole book is struggling with what it means to be a good valued person without having qualities traditionally valued in men (see the quote above about men of action).

If you feel defensive about being an introvert and care about the world of influential people, this might be the book for you.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Unlocked” by Gerald Zaltman

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book coverRecommended to me by: Received a copy from Asakiyume who edited it

Gerald Zaltman is a marketing consultant for corporate executives and a professor emeritus of business administration at Harvard. The idea for this book came out of interactions with his young grandchildren. I do not belong to these target audiences, and the book did not resonate with me. I realized as I read the first few sections that the author had not won my trust, so I was engaging with the thought exercises warily, waiting to be tricked and tripped up.

The book starts off with a couple of ethical dilemmas, and then the rest is about many ways our thinking can be influenced that we might be unaware of, and unconscious assumptions we might be making. There was no mention of racism, sexism, or any other -isms that lead to unconscious biases affecting our thinking and responses.

While there is a section on embodied cognition, it is more about how, for example, holding a warm drink can make us perceive a person more warmly, rather than about how our bodies and minds are integrated. The rest of the book is very much disembodied, based on the premise that, “You are how you think.”

There were links to a couple of interesting related videos:

Selective Attention Test: Count the number of passes between players dressed in white.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

A Portrait Session with a Twist: 6 photographers, one subject, 6 different stories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-TyPfYMDK8

The ebook contains live links and color illustrations. In one exercise, color names are printed in non-matching colors and the instruction is to say the color of the text rather than read the word. The gray-scale illustration in the printed book does not do the exercise justice.

Available at Amazon.

“All Your Worth” by Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi

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Subtitle: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan

Recommended to me by: Lis

This is a practical, down-to-earth book written in a warm, reassuring style by a mother-daughter team. The authors know that most readers will have a great deal of anxiety about finances, so they try to settle that first thing.

Their plan:
From your total income after taxes
50% Must-Haves
30% Wants
20% Savings

The goal is to get finances running smoothly so that they can be in the background rather than the foreground.

Their plan makes sense to me, which means it’s congruent with the financial advice I absorbed growing up. Minimize debt, even for a mortgage. Reduce recurring expenses as much as possible. Shop carefully for insurance, since it’s essentially betting against yourself. Saving is important. And, as I have learned over time, it’s important to have fun and enjoy life, too.

The plan is based on having a salary, so I’ve been thinking about how to apply it to a sole proprietor business. I think I’ll have to add a second set of categories for the business, and guesstimate the taxes as a straight percentage of income. Still, it seems useful enough to me to be worth going to the trouble of figuring out what my Must-Haves are.

They say Must-Haves are recurring expenses that you can’t put off for six months. Anything else goes into Wants. I think that blurs expenses for maintenance for the house and yard and business. Those can be delayed, but not put off forever. I might add a sub-category for that under Wants and see how much room it takes up. It’s also unclear to me where major expenses like a new roof fall. You save up for them, and they’re optional for a while until something goes wrong and suddenly they’re a Must-Have.

The book was published in 2005, and they have the same cheerfully optimistic advice about the stock market that I received with my first 401k in 1991. After losing my first chunk of retirement savings in the dot-bomb of 2001 and then watching my socially conscious investments stagnate, I no longer think the stock market is a viable savings strategy for socially conscious investors. I haven’t come up with a good alternate strategy, however.

I’ve also seen the rule, 10% of after-tax income for charity and making the world a better place. I was surprised not to see charity brought up anywhere in this book. I suppose that falls under Wants, but to me it seems like an important category. They wanted to keep things very simple.

The last section of the book is about planning for financial emergencies – job loss, serious illness, etc. Plan which Wants to cut first. Plan how to reduce Must-Haves if becomes necessary. It even has a section on how and when to declare bankruptcy.

Recommended for a practical, reassuring way to think about your finances.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Sacred Economics” by Charles Eisenstein

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Subtitle: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition

Recommended to me by: Tina Tau

This book has a hopeful story about our current disastrous economic and political situation. In reaching for connection rather than separation, we can build a new sustainable world to emerge from the ruins of the old. I love that story, and the support it gives me for the ways I choose to live my life.

The book itself is repetitive, and attempts to convince by comparing an unsubstantiated idyllic past with an admittedly problematic present and attributing the difference to charging interest on money, as well as monetizing the Commons. I’m not convinced that ceasing to charge interest will return us to the idyll, nor am I convinced that it’s possible to wrest the world from the interest-charging people in power.

My doubts were awakened when the author blithely states in passing that poor people are fat because they are addicted to food because of scarcity. When I see such a blatantly false unsubstantiated statement in his book, I start questioning the rest of his narrative.

I also noticed that the book makes no mention of sexism or racism as it describes the appropriation of the commons. I didn’t notice any mention of most of the appropriation being done by white men. Seems like an egregious omission not to have that truth front and center. The Resistance is being led by middle-aged women, many of them of color. It rankles to be erased twice, first in being the ones who are stolen from, and second being the ones who are rebuilding.

I like the impulse to envision what we do want, rather than fighting what we don’t want. We need people to do both, and I am more suited to the former than the latter.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Fierce Conversations” by Susan Scott

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Subtitle: Achieving Success at Work & in Life, One Conversation at a Time

Recommended to me by: Jessie Link

Susan Scott is a consultant to corporate CEOs, coaching them in fierce conversations. While the book does include some non-work examples, and carefully mixes or avoids pronouns, it also fails to address the power dynamics and mostly homogeneous demographics of CEOs. I found it difficult to see myself in some of the corporate examples, especially when the focus was on Susan Scott’s consulting business.

At the same time, there was a lot in the book that resonated for me.

“Successful relationships require that all parties view getting their core needs met as being legitimate.”

“There is something within us that responds deeply to people who level with us.”

Fierce conversations are defined as “robust, intense, strong, powerful, passionate, eager, unbridled.” They avoid blame and attack.

7 Principles:

  1. Master the courage to interrogate reality. Reality keeps changing. What are you pretending not to know?
  2. Come out from behind yourself into the conversation and make it real.
  3. Be here, prepared to be nowhere else. Speak and listen as if this is the most important conversation you will ever have with this person.
  4. Tackle your toughest challenge today.
  5. Obey your instincts. Trust your perceptions, but don’t be attached to them.
  6. Take responsibility for your emotional wake. The conversation is the relationship. Share appreciation and praise. Speak with clarity, conviction, and compassion.
  7. Let silence do the heavy lifting.

    I had the most trouble with Principle 4. While some people need encouragement to tackle challenges, others need encouragement to step back, or to take the smallest possible step forward at a time.

    The book includes frameworks for difficult conversations, and exercises for becoming more honest and self-aware.

    Available at Powell’s Books.